Sculpture

A novel ’4D printing’ method inspired by plants. This series of images shows the transformation (top right) of a 4D-printed hydrogel composite structure (top left) after its submersion (bottom) in water (credit: Wyss Institute at Harvard University) Harvard University scientists have evolved their microscale 3D printing technology to the fourth dimension, time.

Inspired by natural structures like plants, which respond and change their form over time according to environmental stimuli, the team has designed 4D-printed hydrogel composite structures that change shape upon immersion in water. The team is located at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University and the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

“This work represents an elegant advance in programmable materials assembly, made possible by a multidisciplinary approach,” said Jennifer Lewis, Sc.D., senior author of a new study reported on January 25 in a new in Nature Materials. Derived from wood. The ‘flying scientist’ who chased spores. On a July day in 1930, British Airship R100 took to the sky from a Bedfordshire airfield on its first transatlantic flight.

As it made its way across the Atlantic Ocean, 2,000ft above sea-level, a window opened and Squadron Leader Booth, wearing a pair of rubber gloves, leaned out.
A Sea of Glass. If you have the opportunity, you must go see this exhibition!

According to his Wikipage, Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel (1834–1919) was a German biologist, naturalist, philosopher, physician, professor and artist who discovered, described and named thousands of new species, mapped a genealogical tree relating all life forms, and coined many terms in biology. Now, what’s interesting for us is the fact that in 1904 Haeckel published the book Kunstformen der Natur (Art Forms in Nature) that included over 100 detailed, multi-colour illustrations of animals and sea creatures.
Putting the Glass Flowers in new light. The New York Botanical Garden. "The Culture of the Copy": Victorians' Obsession With Wax Flowers.

3-D printing blossoms into powerful new tool for ecologists. 3D printing has been used to make everything from cars to medical implants.

Now, ecologists are using the technology to make artificial flowers, which they say could revolutionise our understanding of plant-pollinator interactions. Their study involving hawkmoths - a close relative of the species made famous by the film Silence of the Lambs - is published in the British Ecological Society's journal Functional Ecology. Since long before Charles Darwin, ecologists have been fascinated by flower shape, and in particular how animal pollinators have shaped the evolution of floral traits.

But studying the impact of flower shape on pollinator behaviour is difficult. Ecologists have either relied on plant breeding (which means they can only study flower shapes found in nature) or made flowers by hand from paper maché (which can be time consuming and could make it difficult for ecologists to test each other's results).
3-D–Printed Flowers Lure Invasive Weevils to Their Deaths in Wisconsin. There's something particularly cruel in using beauty to kill, but that's exactly what scientists at the Chicago Botanic Garden set out to do earlier this summer in the sand dunes of northern Wisconsin.

There Kayri Havens and her colleagues planted about 60 3-D-printed flowers to lure invasive weevils to their death. For more than a decade, beginning in the 1990s, scientists deliberately distributed the invasive weevil Larinus planus throughout the country to consume Canada thistle, an aggressive weed that had run rampant through American farm fields and rangeland. But like many well-intentioned species-control efforts before it, the plan went awry. The long-snouted insect jumped host and attacked native thistles, including the Pitcher's thistle, a flowering spiky plant that grows only in the Great Lakes region and was listed as a threatened species in 1988 by the U.S.

Fish and Wildlife Service in response to habitat destruction.
Jude Miller Flowers - Home. Chinese Porcelain Company. Sculpting Glass Reef Life - Emily Williams Sculpture. Carmen Almon, the Naturalist. The greatest botanical artist of this century quietly works by hand at her home in the south of France.

Photo. Artificial flowers Legeron Paris. Once Seed Was Planted, Chinese Headwear Fad Grew Like Weeds. Photo BEIJING — When Mao stirred China with a call to let a hundred flowers bloom, he surely never imagined anything as frivolous as this.

Across , people are sporting plastic decorations on their heads in the shape of vegetables, fruit and flowers. When the trend started a few months ago, it was usually just a humble bean sprout clipped to the hair and erect like a little green flagpole. The slim green shoot seemed to offer a kind of mute protest against the gray, stressed environment of the city. But as the fad escalated, especially during the current National Day holiday week when Beijing fills with visitors, it has grown to include a riot of plastic vegetation.
Deboramoore. Incredibly Detailed Paper Sculptures Resemble Natural Microorganisms. Magic Circle is Rogan Brown’s latest collection of intricately detailed paper microorganisms.

The Anglo-Irish artist uses a combination of hand and laser cuts to create vividly textured paper sculptures reflecting patterns that naturally occur all around us in coral, bacteria, and microbes.
‘See through science’
August 25, 2012, by Brigitte Nerlich ‘See through science’ I was recently reminiscing about Venice, where I have been many times, soaking up the sunshine, the colours and little miracles in glass (about which more later).

So I started to think about science and glass, and the title of a famous 2005 booklet produced by James Wilsdon and Rebecca Willis popped into my head: See through science. Their work focused on the relation between science and its publics, in particular on processes such as dialogue and participation that attempt to establish closer connections between the two.

They wrote in particular about upstream engagement and about finding new ways of listening to and valuing more diverse forms of public knowledge and social intelligence.
Studies in Intarlacement, Xylem and Phloem.